Source identified1
“How great my grief, my joys how few, Since first it was my fate to know thee!”
The speaker measures a relationship by the imbalance between grief and joy, making recollection itself the structure through which attachment and loss are assessed.
Source note: “How Great My Grief,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. It is a dramatic lyric statement and is not automatically read as direct autobiography.